“Details I don’t want.” Sienna steps up to the landing. She makes it to the door before she looks back briefly. Her mouth opens like she’s going to speak. She hesitates. Mouth closes. She walks inside.
I don’t know what to think. What to do.
The reason I’m on the island has vanished.
CHAPTER 40
Klein
“Doyou know what I mean, man?” Shane slurs the question for the third time.
Do I care about the purr of an engine in a Mercedes versus a BMW? Not one damn bit, but I say, “Yes, I know what you mean.”
Anything to make him stop talking.
We come to a stop in front of his place. He slides out of the golf cart, slow and viscous like the slime Oliver likes to make.
Shane gives walking a fifty percent effort, then abandons the attempt and lies down.
To be clear, I don’t like Shane. Never have, and that feeling has followed through the entirety of this week. My best guess is that I’ll never like him.
That’s okay. People can’t all like each other all the time.
But just because I’d rather spend time with a chipped cinder block wall than this guy doesn’t mean I’ll leave himlying on the gravel in the front of his rented house. Though I must admit, his current position suits him.
Slipping my arms under his armpits, I lift him. “Come on, dipshit.” Can’t resist the opportunity to call him a name or two while I can. I’d say it to him sober, too, but this way I don’t have to deal with that bloated look he gets.
I haul him inside, but only to the living room couch. I’m not nice enough to tuck him into his bed with warm milk and a bedtime story. Not when he’s spoken poorly of Paisley.
He sits on the couch, looking around the room with half-mast eyelids.
His head lolls back on the couch, his gaze on the ceiling. “Pretty fucking scary how someone can change, right? It’s like... like... you owe it to me to stay the same.” He runs a finger under his nose, sniffing. “Bait and switch, but in reverse.”
Pre-wedding jitters must’ve grabbed onto this guy and inserted its hooks. However, I’m not interested in being his therapist. I can’t wait to get the hell out of here. Paisley is waiting for me, and if tonight ends like last night, it means the opportunity to show her how quickly I’ve become obsessed with running my hands over the small of her back and tracing her tattoo with my tongue. It’s my new favorite pastime, and I’ll destroy anybody who gets in the way of it.
“Yeah, weird how people change when you think you know them. Sorry that’s happened with Sienna, but?—”
Shane levels a bleary one-eyed gaze at me. “Paisley. Not Sienna.”
Ok, now he has my attention. “What about Paisley?”
He tosses his hands in the air, slumping down when they fall back to his lap. “She’s different. She’sfunnow. She’sfun-ny. She wasn’t either of those things when I was with her. She wasthere, but nothing colorful. A background person. I needed more.” He sighs. “And now she’smore.”
I could challenge each statement he has made. I could cite examples to contradict him. But in the end, he’s very drunk and I very much don’t care what he thinks. “Agree to disagree,” I offer amicably.
“You must remember,” Shane insists. He raises a pointed finger and stabs at the air between us. “You knew her back then, too. Not very well, probably.”
It would be beyond satisfying to hear the thwack of my hand up the side of this dumbass’s head, but it wouldn’t get us anywhere. The pen is mightier than the sword, so it must also follow that a verbal assault is more lasting than physical. I take a seat on the coffee table in front of Shane. He looks like shit. “As the ex, it’s your right to remember Paisley as the person you believed her to be.” Not that she was what this idiot thought she was, but I digress. “And it’s Paisley’s right to be whomever she wants to be in reality. You get to remember her as you perceived her. She gets to go on to be whatever she wants on the road to becoming whomever she wants. Make sense?”
Shane’s eyes drift closed. “Clear as mud.”
I leave him there on his couch, possibly passed out. I did the nice human thing already. I made sure he got inside, but he probably would’ve been served a muchneeded slice of humble pie if he’d woken up in the morning with gravel indentations in his cheek.
Here’s the thing: I wasn’t the lucky bastard who dated Paisley for three years, and I get the feeling I knew her far better than he did. Paisley was never simplythere. Shane was, and still is, too shallow and self-involved to see. Paisley wasn’t a background character. She was the whole damn story. A complicated plot, interwoven with subplots. A riveting main character. Internal conflict mixed with shifting goals.
Shane was never man enough to read her story.
But me? I’m immersed in it. Forget slowly diving in, I’m already lost in her pages. I was hooked on page one, sentence one.
